Privacy Policy

Where we rely on legitimate interests, the Law requires us to say what they are rather than merely name the condition. There are two.

• Server logs. Our interest is in keeping the site up, finding faults, and identifying abuse such as an attempt to overwhelm it or a reported abusive message sent through one of our forms, so that we can block where it came from. The data is the minimum a web server records in order to answer a request at all, it is not used to build a profile of anyone, it is not combined with any account, and nobody is subject to a decision because of it. Against that, the intrusion on a visitor is close to nil — which is what makes the balance come out the way it does, not the strength of our own interest.
• Negotiator contact details on a listing. Our interest is in publishing a property advert that a reader can act on, and reaching the agent is the point of reading it. The data was published by the agency itself, on a public page, for exactly this purpose, and it identifies someone in their professional capacity rather than their private life. We add nothing to it and we do not use it to market to them. Section 4 sets out the removal route, which is the safeguard that keeps this balance honest.

No. Nothing on this site requires an account, and no law requires you to give us anything. Every listing, every filter, the stamp duty calculator and the guides all work signed out. An email address is required only to create an account, and the only consequence of not giving one is that saved properties and saved searches are not available to you.

From your agency’s own website — the public listing page or search index for the property concerned — read by our crawler, which identifies itself as HomelyBot and honours robots.txt. Nothing is bought from a data broker, taken from a portal, or assembled from any other source. The property page on this site names the agency and links to the original.

Separately from any listing, we hold each agency’s office address, telephone number and website address, read once from the agency’s own public website and shown at the top of its page here. That is business contact information rather than anything personal in most cases — but for a sole trader working from home it can be both, and we would rather say so than rely on the distinction. The removal route in clause 3.4 covers it in exactly the same way, and the address is shown only where the agency publishes one: we never derive, estimate or look up an address that an agency has chosen not to state.

We display it beside the listing so that someone reading the advert can contact the agency about the property. That is the whole of it. We do not market to negotiators, we do not sell or licence contact data, we do not build a directory of individuals, and we do not enrich it against anything else.

Email info@homely.je from your agency address, or tell us which agency you work for, and we will remove your name and contact details from every listing on the site and stop reading them from future crawls. We will confirm when it is done. You do not need to give a reason, and asking does not affect the listings themselves.

An agency that wants its listings removed from the site altogether — not just a negotiator’s details — should read clause 6 of the Terms and Conditions, which sets out that route and the timescale we work to.

Where personal data is obtained from somewhere other than the person it describes, Article 12(3) of the DPJL requires the person to be told within four weeks. Writing individually to every negotiator whose details appear on an agency website we read would mean emailing people who have not asked to hear from us, using contact details we hold only because they were published for property enquiries — which is the outcome the duty exists to prevent rather than to cause. So this section is the notice: it is public, it is linked from every page of the site, it names the source, and it carries a removal address that works in one email.

Our buying and moving directory lists Jersey property lawyers, surveyors, mortgage brokers and lenders, and removal and storage firms. For each we hold the business’s name, telephone number, email address and website, its logo and a photograph, and quotations of how it describes its own services and prices, all read from its own public website on the date shown on its page. We show an office address only where the business publishes commercial premises; where it trades from a home we show at most the parish, and we never look up an address it has not stated.

We show the telephone number and website of a mortgage lender on its card and its page. Every other business’s contact details are on its own page only, and we do not show its email address: readers contact it through a form on that page, which we email on to the business, or by revealing its telephone number or following the link to its website there. We count how many enquiries each business has been sent, how often its number has been revealed and how often its website link has been followed, and those counts hold nothing about who did any of them (section 2 and clause 5.1).

For most firms that is business information. For a sole trader it may also be personal data, and clauses 3.1 to 3.5 apply to it exactly as they do to an agency: the source is your own website, we hold it so that someone buying or moving can contact you, the list is alphabetical and recommends nobody, and one email to info@homely.je corrects your entry or removes it.

When an agency stops advertising a property, we mark the listing as no longer available and remove it from every search result immediately. Its own page keeps working for a further fourteen days, showing what we last held and stating plainly that the agent has removed it, so that somebody following a link is told what happened rather than meeting an error. After that the page stops resolving. Any personal data in the listing, including a negotiator’s details, is covered by the same removal route in clause 3.4 at any point in that window or afterwards.

We count five things: how many times a listing page is opened, how many times an agency page is opened, and how many times somebody reveals a phone number, follows a link to an agency’s own website, or starts an enquiry. Agents are shown these figures for their own listings, which is the whole reason the numbers exist — an estate agent should be able to see what being on this site is actually worth to them.

Each of those is a running total and nothing else. When you open a listing, a number in our database goes up by one. There is no record that it was you: no visitor identifier, no session identifier, no cookie and no IP address is stored, and none is created in order to be discarded later. The consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is the test of whether the sentence above is true — we cannot tell you which listings any one person looked at, we cannot build a profile of anyone, and we could not answer a request to do either, because the information to do it has never existed.

One thing is stored in your browser to make the counting less wrong: a key beginning homely.seen. in session storage, so that scrolling back up a listing does not count as opening it again. It is in the table below, it never leaves your browser, and it is gone when you close the tab.

Your IP address reaches our server with every request, as it must for the page to be sent back to you — that is how the internet works. It is used in memory for a few minutes to stop the same connection flooding a form or the counter, and it is never written to our database or attached to a count or a message. Like any web server, our hosting platform records it in its request logs (section 2), and if somebody reports an abusive message sent through the site we may look up the address it came from in those logs and block it.

We use Google Analytics 4, provided by Google, to understand how this site is used in aggregate: which searches people run, which listings they open, which pages they leave from, and roughly which parts of the island and which devices they arrive on. It is how we decide what to build and what to fix, and it is the only thing on this site that involves a company other than us observing your visit.

Nothing is loaded from Google until you agree. Before you answer, and if you answer no, your browser makes no request to Google’s servers for this purpose at all and no analytics cookie is created — the script is not on the page rather than on the page and switched off. That is a statement about what the code does, not a setting we have asked Google to honour.

What it collects when you have agreed:

• A randomly generated identifier for your browser, stored in the two _ga cookies in the table below. It is not your name and we never connect it to your account, but it is an online identifier and it does distinguish your browser from somebody else’s, so we do not describe this as anonymous. That is the honest reason we ask you first.
• Which pages you open, in what order, and how long you stay.
• Roughly where you are, which Google derives from your IP address. Google does not store the IP address itself and does not make it available to us — we cannot see the IP address of anyone in these figures.
• Your device, browser and screen size, and the site you arrived from, if any.

Google acts as our processor for this: it holds the data on our instructions under Google’s data processing terms and may not use it for its own purposes. Advertising features, Google Signals and ad personalisation are all switched off, and the site’s security policy independently refuses any request to Google’s advertising domains — so that is enforced in two places rather than promised in one. This data leaves Jersey; section 7 says where it goes and on what basis.

Our lawful basis is your consent, under Schedule 2 Part 1 paragraph 1 of the DPJL. You can withdraw it at any moment using the switch below, and withdrawing takes effect immediately: it stops the tag reporting on the page you are already on and deletes the cookies it has set. We will ask again after twelve months whichever way you answered, because an answer given three years ago is not really an answer, and the cookies are set to expire after twelve months so that they cannot outlast it.

This works immediately and needs no account, no email and no reload. It applies to this browser on this device, because the answer is stored in the browser rather than against a person — which is itself the point: we would need to identify you to remember it any other way.

Google LLC and its group companies, which provide the hosting, database, file storage and sign-in this site runs on (Firebase Authentication, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Storage and Firebase App Hosting) and, where you have agreed to it, the analytics described in clause 5.2. Google acts as our processor: it holds the data on our instructions, under Google’s data processing terms, and may not use it for its own purposes.

The analytics is the same company already hosting the site, so agreeing to it does not hand your visit to anybody new — which is why we did not reach for a separate analytics vendor when the question came up.

Resend, which delivers the email this site sends: the acknowledgement when you use the contact form, an enquiry you send to an estate agent from a listing and the receipt that follows it, a message you send to somebody advertising a parking space and the confirmation that follows it, and the alerts in clause 8.2 of our Terms if you switch one on. What it receives is the address the message is going to and the message itself — for an alert, that is the name you gave the saved search and the listings that matched it. It sends on our instructions under its data processing terms and may not use any of it for its own purposes. Mail is sent from its European region. Resend keeps a copy of each message it sends for a limited period under its own retention settings, and then deletes it.

The estate agent you write to is not a processor. When you send an enquiry from a listing we email it to the agency advertising that property, with your name, email address, telephone number if you gave one and your message, and from that moment they hold it as a controller in their own right under their own privacy policy — exactly as if you had emailed them yourself. We do not store it ourselves and cannot recall it. The agency’s reply comes from them, not from us.

A business in our moving directory that you contact through the form on its page is in the same position. We email your name, email address, telephone number if you gave one and your message to that business — or to ourselves, to forward, where we hold no address for them — and from then on they hold it as a controller in their own right. We keep a count of how many enquiries each business has been sent, and nothing about who sent them.

Somebody advertising a parking space is not a processor either. A message you send them about their space is delivered to their email address, and we keep a copy; from then on they hold it as a controller in their own right. We do not read these messages. If you advertise a space, you receive the name, contact details and message of everyone who writes to you about it, and what you do with them is your responsibility.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation, in the United Kingdom, receives the address you type when you press “Find on map” while advertising a parking space, through its Nominatim geocoding service. The request comes from our server, so it carries the address and nothing else — not your name, your account or your IP address. The Foundation handles it under its own privacy policy.

If you sign in with Google, that is a separate relationship between you and Google acting as a controller in its own right, governed by Google’s privacy policy rather than this one. All we receive from it is your name, email address and profile picture.

We may disclose personal data where we are obliged to by law, a court order, or a lawful request from a public authority, and where necessary to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim. In Jersey that condition sits in Schedule 2 Part 2 paragraph 7 of the DPJL rather than in Part 1 — a distinction worth naming because most policies file it in the wrong place.

If Granite Digital is sold, merged, or transfers the assets that include this site, personal data may transfer with it. Anyone with an account would be told before that happened, not after, and the buyer would be bound by this policy until they published one of their own.